


in the interim, while you were gone

by cenotaphy



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Castiel POV, Castiel in Hell, Castiel is a Winchester, Castiel resisting torture, Dark fic, Demons, Demons Are Assholes, Destiel - Freeform, Gen, Graphic Violence, Hell, Hiatus fic, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Mostly hurt, Non-Consensual Touching, Post-Episode: s13e07 War of the Worlds, Pre-Slash, Protective Winchesters (Supernatural), Reunions, Season/Series 13, Suffering, Torture, Whump, Wings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-29
Updated: 2017-12-29
Packaged: 2019-02-23 16:28:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,160
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13194021
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cenotaphy/pseuds/cenotaphy
Summary: Asmodeus may have no interest in torturing the lowly seraph he's captured, but the same can't be said for some of Hell's other denizens. Locked in a cell with no idea whether rescue is coming, can Castiel survive long enough for the Winchesters to get to him?





	in the interim, while you were gone

**Author's Note:**

> This is a dark fic with buckets and buckets of hurt Castiel and there's a lot of demonic torture, so mind the tags. 
> 
> Takes place after episode 13.07.

Asmodeus tells the demons to ensure that Castiel remains in one piece, but he doesn't specify any restrictions beyond that. Castiel grows used to the denizens of Hell prowling just beyond the bars of his cell, staring at him with hot, hungry eyes. On the third day of his captivity, a male demon sits cross-legged on the other side of the bars and unfurls a long strip of parchment inked with jagged symbols. He presses his palm to them, one at a time, and Castiel drops to his knees and grits his teeth as each symbol burns red-gold and sends pain searing through a different part of his body.

The demon pauses halfway through the sequence. "My name is Raz, by the way," he says off-handedly, as if they are sitting down to coffee instead of torture, as if there are not iron bars between them.

Castiel turns his head to one side and spits out a mouthful of blood, a parting gift from the previous sigil.

"Go...to Hell," he manages wearily.

Raz raises an eyebrow. "That'd be something of a redundancy, don't you think?" he says. "Given where we are."

Raz's vessel looks a little like Dean, broad-shouldered and green-eyed, with short brown hair. It makes Castiel's heart twist in a way that has nothing to do with symbols on parchment; he has no idea where Dean is, whether he and Sam are alright, if they are any closer to finding Jack. He should be with them, helping—but instead, like an idiot, he'd gotten himself captured. While consorting with _Lucifer_ , no less.

 _I never learn_ , he thinks bitterly.

Raz looks irritated to be ignored, and he slaps his hand down on the next sigil. Castiel chokes on nothing at all, reaching up to claw at his own throat. Then, as Raz proceeds through the remaining symbols, he is able to breathe again, sucking in a huge gasp just in time for a wave of magically-induced nausea to make him double over, gagging. The last symbol drills into his head until light explodes in his vision and he collapses to the damp stone floor. As he loses consciousness, he can see the demon grinning at him, green eyes switching to black, easy as anything.

***

Castiel awakens to find that he is surrounded by four demons, and that his hands are cuffed behind his back. His head throbs, and his first attempt to rise ends in him simply collapsing back onto his side. The cuffs burn against the skin of his wrists, and he can feel his grace fighting weakly against the heavy bands of metal.

Raz leans over him. "You like them?" he sneers. "They wouldn't hold up to a human or a demon, but they sure do a number on halos, don't they?"

Castiel grits his teeth and tries again to stand. He succeeds this time, rising unsteadily to his feet and fixing the demons with what he hopes is an intimidating stare. They've removed his coat and jacket; he can see the garments piled in a heap in a corner of the cell. He wonders where Lucifer is, what part of Hell's prison the archangel has been relegated to. If the demons dare to take advantage of their former master's position of weakness.

The demon to his right, the only one with a female vessel, barks out a sharp laugh as he glares at her. "That ain't gonna do you any good without any juice to back it up," she tells him.

She's right; Castiel can feel the weakness in his limbs. If he rushed one of the demons now, he wouldn't stand a chance.

He does it anyway. Goes for the weakest-looking one, head-butting him hard in the face and then lashing out with a kick. The impact is solid and gets a cry of pain out of his target, but the other three are upon him in an instant. The female seizes his cuffed arms; Raz goes straight for his hair, grabbing a handful of it and wrenching Castiel's head back. The demon he'd head-butted is swearing furiously.

They throw him to the floor, and the demon he'd tried to overcome pauses his string of curses long enough to stomp on his face, hard. Castiel hears a messy crunch and feels blood gushing from his nose. He rolls over onto his side so that it doesn't all run down into his mouth.

The demons spend a few minutes kicking him for good measure, spitting out invectives all the while. Castiel curls in on himself and tries to breathe through the sharp bursts of agony. They finally tire of their sport and leave the cell, sneering to each other.

Raz is the last to leave. "The old King had a bit of a soft spot for you, Castiel," he says, pausing at the cell door as his companions vanish down the torch-lit corridor. "The new King has no such weakness. Trust me, beyond keeping you alive, we have no constraints. Think about that."

Raz leaves, slamming the door behind him, and Castiel is left to struggle for breathe on the stones. His grace moves sluggishly through his injuries, knitting the crushed cartilage of his nose back together, easing the bruising on his torso. He struggles into a sitting position, wrenching pointlessly at the cuffs and receiving only a sickening jolt of pain in return.

 _The Winchesters_ , he thinks, quelling the fear that threatens to rise in his gut. The Winchesters will come for him.

***

The Winchesters don't come for him, but the demons do, again and again in the following days.

As far as Castiel can tell, it's more for their own amusement than anything else; guard duty in Hell, it appears, is not particularly thrilling, and Raz seems to be inciting them to relieve their boredom by paying visits to Castiel. For a while they show up nearly every day, though he never knows what the hour will be, nor what their chosen torment will be.

On one day they are content to simply beat him until his face is slick with blood. The next day they hold him down, rip open his shirt, and pour acid on his chest until he is screaming and writhing on the stones. His grace keeps his flesh from simply melting away, but the angry red patch of the chemical burn lingers. Another day it's knives, and they don't stop until his body is littered with cuts of all shapes and sizes, sluggishly oozing blood and refusing to heal. Castiel is grateful that none of them seem to have access to an angel blade; he isn't sure his fettered grace could keep him alive through that.

It's never more than the four original demons, for which he is grateful. Most of the time all four of them join in, although there are days they take turns hanging back to jeer at Castiel while egging each other on. He prefers when they come as a group. When Raz comes alone, the torment takes on an edge of intimacy that makes Castiel's skin crawl. He likes to crouch behind Castiel and pull him up close with a hand around his throat, so that Castiel is pressed flush against him while Raz reaches around to trace a knifepoint idly over his chest and stomach.

"Why?" Castiel gasps out one day. Raz has come alone. He is using his fingers to paint yet another sigil on the floor of the cell. Castiel is curled on his side, retching emptily from the effects of the last one. "Why..." He has to break off and dry-heave for a moment. "...are you...doing this?" he finishes weakly, at last.

Raz, crouched near Castiel's feet, raises his eyebrows and appears to ponder the question. "I've been here a long time," he says calmly. "Studied under Alastair, actually."

 _Ah_. Castiel closes his eyes. A torturer. His guard trained as a torturer of Hell.

As far as he's concerned, that explains everything, but Raz keeps going, talking almost dreamily, as if he enjoys the smooth drawl of his own voice.

"You asked why. Well...because I _can_. Because I want to. Because I've tortured every sort of person who walked under the sun but I've never... _had_...an angel, before."

He runs his tongue over his bottom lip, looks at Castiel with undisguised hunger in his eyes.

Castiel wets his lips, and thinks of something that Dean would say. "Did you torture your victims mostly with boring speeches? Or did knives come into play too?"

Something like anger flits across the features of Raz's vessel for an instant, and his eyes flicker black, so fast it could almost have been a trick of the firelight. Then he laughs and taps the sigil on the floor. It activates with a burst of warm radiance and Castiel arches his spine and screams as pain rips through him.

***

Castiel doesn't give up the tiny, hidden hope he nurses within himself. After every unwelcome visit, when the demons leave him crumpled and, more likely than not, bleeding on the ground, he takes out this hope and holds it close. He tells himself that the Winchesters will find him. All he has to do is hold on.

But it's possible that he was lying to himself the entire time, because when Dean actually appears, it's nearly a full minute before Castiel believes what he's seeing.

"Cas," Dean says hoarsely. The torchlight plays orange over his skin, and he keeps darting anxious glances over his shoulder at the silent corridor. His eyes are green and worried. He is the most beautiful thing Castiel has ever seen.

"Cas," Dean says again, more urgently, and hurries forward. The cell door swings wide behind him. He stops less than an arm's length away, dropping to his knees to peer urgently at Castiel.

Castiel levers himself up onto one elbow, gritting his teeth with the effort. "Dean," he gasps. "You...you came."

"Of course I came. Why the hell wouldn't I?"

"I...I thought...you have to find Jack, don't you?"

"He's not the priority, you moron." Dean smiles, half-rueful, half-gentle. "You think I could bear it if I lost you?"

"I..." Castiel falters, because he operates under the default assumption that Dean could bear it perfectly well without him. Dean has Sam, after all. Dean has a home and a family and a purpose, and Castiel is...counted as a friend, yes, maybe even family, but dead weight in so many ways.

As if he's hearing the thoughts that flit through Castiel's mind, Dean exhales heavily, and when he speaks again, his voice is tender but deliberate. "Cas, "I'm not losing you again. You mean too much to me, you got that?"

Castiel hears in Dean's words the echo of his own, months ago, uttered in a dark forest clearing while a Reaper lay dead at his feet. He nods, something tight swelling in his chest. "Yes...Dean."

"Good," says Dean. The lines around his eyes crinkle as he smiles, and then he shifts his weight forward and reaches out toward Castiel. Castiel leans toward him, turning his face upward and into Dean's touch, feeling his heart flutter bizarrely in his chest.

Dean lays his palm against Castiel's face, and Castiel feels nothing—no pressure from Dean's hand, no warmth, _nothing_. He furrows his brow, dread suddenly heavy within him, and before his eyes the image of Dean flickers, like an image on a faulty TV screen.

Laughter rings in his ears. Castiel tears his eyes away from the fading illusion of Dean and sees Raz leaning against the cell bars, unnoticed somehow, whether through glamour or through Castiel's own idiotic focus on what he had thought— _how could you think, how could you be that stupid_ —was Dean.

"By Lucifer, that was pathetic," Raz chuckles. "You're so desperate, angel. It shows on every line of your face. Does he know? Hell, he must. A blind man could tell."

Castiel raises his head, controls his face so that he gives Raz only a blank stare. So Raz had guessed, then. Maybe the whole world knows, and is laughing at him too.

Raz drops into a crouch. "And yet you were on your own when we brought you in," he muses. "And you've been rotting in this cell for days, without so much as a rescue attempt."

Castiel drops his eyes, feeling his breath hitch. The Winchesters are coming, he reminds himself. They've been through too much together for him to doubt the depth of their loyalty. They _must_ be looking for him—or they know where he is, already, and are searching for a way into Asmodeus's sanctum.

Raz grins, a boyish expression that makes him look, for a moment, even more like Dean. "Wanna know why that is? It's because Asmodeus has your phone. Every time your boys call, he just slaps on his best Castiel voice and throws 'em off the scent."

He leans against the bars, smirking at Castiel. "That's right, the idiots are paying so little attention to you that my boss can fool them with a couple deadpan one-liners and a _hello, Dean_." He raises the pitch of his voice for the last two words, makes them high and breathless, a grotesque parody of what's clearly meant to be Castiel's voice.

"If Asmodeus is underestimating the Winchesters," Castiel grits out, "then he does so at his peril. As do you."

"Oh, we don't like it when our humans get insulted, do we?" Raz mocks. "Even when they don't deserve your loyalty. I mean, come on, if you were going to betray your kind and whore yourself out to a pair of loose cannons, couldn't you have picked demons? Werewolves? Vampires? Something with a little more firepower?"

He drops to a crouch, teases one finger across the bars. "C'mon, angel. You aren't so hard on the eyes. Play nice with me and I can make your stay a little less..." He grins again, rolls the joke around in his mouth before dropping it: "...hellish."

Castiel doesn't bother hiding the revulsion he feels. "Leave me be," he spits at the demon.

"Mmm, mind your tone."

Castiel rolls over, putting his back to Raz. "Torture me if you will, but otherwise, leave me alone," he snaps at the far wall. He closes his eyes, expecting the creak of the cell door any minute, followed by some burst of pain, but after a long silence there is only the sound of Raz's footsteps, fading away down the corridor.

***

The demons are back the next day, or what Castiel assumes is the next day—all four of them, looking smug and conspiratorial. They flip him onto his back as he struggles uselessly against four pairs of hands. Something that feels and tastes like leather is shoved into his mouth, wrapped under his chin and behind his head.

"We don't want you screaming too loud for this next part," they tell him.

Castiel grits his teeth down on the gag, glaring at Raz, who is straddling his stomach.

"One of your friends came to see us," says Raz, reaching out to pinch Castiel's cheek like a benevolent uncle. "He's been talking the boss's ear off."

One of his friends? Castiel tries to think, but aside from the Winchesters, he's coming up blank as to who the demon might be referring to.

"British," the female demon adds. "Bit of a stick up his ass if you ask us." Castiel's heart sinks. Dread mounts in its place as he watches Raz reach into a pocket and pull out a gleaming metal slug, an inch long. It pools in his fingers like half-molten silver.

"Well, he may be a dick, but he's got nice toys," sniggers another demon, tall with thinning hair.

The female demon crouches, runs her fingertips lightly down the side of his face. "This one's called a Kaustos polyp. You'll like it."

Raz winks at Castiel, and places the slug on his bare chest. It ripples, suddenly animate, and oozes along his torso like the real thing. It leaves a trail of glittering gold ooze behind it, like a brush streak of metallic paint. Castiel feels it against his skin, cool at first, then warm, suddenly, tingling. And then _hot_ , searingly so, burning into him like napalm. It _hurts_ , it hurts worse than the acid, worse than the knives, worse than any physical torture they've leveled against him thus far. He screams into the gag, a muffled sound, writhing in their grips until they finally release him and back away.

When he raises his head he half expects to see charred lines on his chest, but around the ooze his skin appears perfectly untouched. And yet—it _burns_ , with a festering, acrid heat he can almost taste on the back of his tongue. The slug continues to inch slimily across his chest. He rolls onto his stomach and contorts his body on the floor, desperate to scrape the metallic substance off somehow, but for all the good his frantic efforts do, the gold streaks might as well be tattoos.

"Never thought I'd see an angel down on its belly like that," he hears the tall demon saying. "High and mighty as they are."

"Lord Asmodeus wants us for other business," Raz tells Castiel. "So we won't see you tomorrow. But we don't want you forgetting us while we're gone, yeah?" Castiel barely registers his words. The demons' voices are faint, tinny, filtered through a miasma of pain. The Kaustos polyp is still moving, back and forth across his ribs, leaving that trail of corroding slime, eating away at him.

***

Alone in his cell, Castiel struggles on the floor. His sense of time is shaky, indistinct, but it feels like hours pass while he writhes and shudders. He tries scraping the slug off against the walls, but only succeeds in smearing the caustic gold substance around greater areas of his skin. Meanwhile, the device simply flattens to paper-thinness and resists all his efforts. It continues to ooze steadily across his body—over his back, up and down his arms, around his neck—covering him in streaks of burning gold. It avoids the cuts of the demons' previous sessions with him, seeming to prefer unbroken skin on which to inflict its painful excretions. If his hands had been free, he would have torn into his own flesh to rid himself of the polyp; as it is, he grits his teeth around the leather gag, lies as still as he can, and tries to keep from blacking out.

A hand on his hair cuts through his agonized haze, pulling him back to reality. It's Raz, kneeling beside him, using the fistful of Castiel's hair as a grip to roll him roughly onto his back. Castiel feels a shaky whimper bubbling low in his throat, behind the gag. His torso is criss-crossed in the corrosive gold trails; he can feel the slug, which had finally crossed a hipbone a few minutes ago, inching slowly down his leg towards his ankle.

"Miss me, angel?" Raz's grin is shark-like, his eyes alight with amusement. He reaches his hand towards Castiel's chest.

Castiel flinches—then gasps in shocked relief as a blessed cool pools from Raz's fingertips, soothing the burn of the gold trails. He lifts his head and sees that Raz has brought a pot of salve with him; the demon applies more to Castiel's chest, and the slug's poison dissolves like dust in water, the pain subsiding rapidly.

Castiel looks suspiciously at Raz, waiting for some catch, some even worse torment. But the demon says nothing, seemingly intent on his work, scooping up more of the salve with his fingers and spreading it over Castiel's skin.

"This stuff starts eating into flesh after about thirty-six hours," Raz tells Castiel. "I take it off now, though? You're good as new. Mostly."

He moves his fingers up to Castiel's collarbone. The absence of pain is almost dizzying; Castiel groans in spite of himself, arching his back, tilting his head back to press his throat against Raz's fingers, shaking with relief as more and more of the slug's ooze is neutralized by the salve.

Raz lets his breath hiss out between his teeth. "Oh, angel." He smears a line of the salve down Castiel's cheek, though the slug never ventured there. The ointment smells like myrrh and sage. "It's a pity Asmodeus won't be keeping you around. I'd have you eating scraps from my hand soon enough."

Castiel turns his head away, hating himself for not being able to bear the pain with impassivity, hating the demon's eyes for being the same color as Dean's.

Raz catches him by the chin, forces his head back around so that he can smirk down at Castiel. He never seems to stop smiling.

"Too good for me now?" he mocks. He rattles the pot of ointment. "You need this, angel, so mind your manners." He pulls Castiel's open shirt off his shoulders, down around his wrists, and slaps more salve on. He's rough, and the application stings, but it's a fraction of the gold streaks' effect and Castiel barely feels it.

"I should make you beg for it," Raz muses, working efficiently now, finishing first one arm and then the other. "Oh well." He winks, hooks a finger through the belt loop of Castiel's slacks. "Maybe next time."

Castiel closes his eyes. He wills himself to lie still as Raz tugs off the rest of his clothes and runs two fingers down the outside of his leg, neutralizing the trail of gold ooze there. The Kaustos polyp has reached Castiel's ankle and is beginning slowly to reverse its course; Raz plucks it off with no more effort than it would take to pick a flower. He smears one last daub of ointment where the slug's progress had been interrupted, picks up the pot, and stands.

"See you tomorrow, angel."

He exits the cell, leaving Castiel gagged on the floor, his shirt tangled around his bound wrists, his slacks and boxers pooled around his ankles where Raz had left them.

***

"You sure it'll work?" The female demon looks down at Castiel. Her gaze is contemptuous, disinterested, as if she's surveying a rather loathsome insect.

"Shiv, sweetheart. Have I been wrong, yet?" Raz, by contrast, looks alight with excitement, his tongue poking out from between his teeth, his eyes roving up and down Castiel's body.

Castiel ignores both of them, keeping his eyes trained on the ceiling. Some of the cuts and knife wounds have closed by now, scabbing over under the diminished but persistent effort of his grace. The gold ooze, though, left long pink-white stripes like chemical burns, winding around his torso and arms, running in one long straight line down his bare leg.

Raz unfurls the scroll he's brought with him and begins reading from it. The incantation is an ugly thing, the words guttural and cruel, and halfway through it Castiel realizes what it's for, and a muffled shout bursts from his chest, breaking uselessly against the leather of the gag. He fights uselessly against his restraints, panic rising in his throat, because this is the last thing, the _last safe thing_ that he has, the last thing they can take from him.

Shiv backhands him across the face as he struggles to sit up. The blow splits his lip and knocks him back to the floor. His head strikes the stone hard, making his vision flashes white for an instant. Blood oozes in a thin trickle down his chin.

Raz finishes the spell with a triumphant lilt in his voice. There's a soft, barely audible crackle of power in the air as the magic does its warped work. Castiel arches his back, terrified, screaming through the gag, as his wings are yanked forcibly out of the etheric plane and compelled to manifest between his shoulder blades. It hurts—manifesting them in physical form is taking energy he can't spare, and the wings themselves, fragile and crippled as they are even after his most recent reconstitution, are on fire with the pain of damaged nerve endings and bruised ligaments.

Raz whistles, low. "Well, those have seen better days." He reaches out and jerks the gag out of Castiel's mouth. "What'd you do, fall on them?"

"Don't... _fucking_ touch them," Castiel grits out, his voice hoarse from so long without speech. He tries to quell the panic sparking in his gut. He's never physically manifested his wings before. They're shaking uncontrollably, tiny muscle spasms running along them as he struggles to keep them folded close to his body.

"Look at that, Shiv," Raz marvels. "The halo can curse."

Shiv doesn't reply at first. She stares, instead, at Castiel's wings, her expression pinching with unease. He pulls his knees up to his chest, torn between his instinct to shield himself using his wings and his desire to shield the _wings_ from the demons' gazes.

"Hey." Raz clicks his fingers at her. "Not getting cold feet on me, are you?

She shifts from foot to foot. "This is stupid. Can't we just whip him some more?"

Raz crumples the scroll, shoving it into his pocket. "Are you _scared_? Of the old wives' tales? Worried they'll disintegrate you, or something?"

"Look, you had your fun, you've seen his wings, big deal. I ain't touching 'em."

Raz shrugs, already turning his attention back to Castiel. "Then get the fuck out."

Shiv scowls, shuffling in place for another moment before she whirls and storms out of the cell. Castiel watches her retreat up the corridor until a firm hand forces his chin around.

"Word on the street is you got put back together recently," Raz murmurs, looking into Castiel's eyes. "Big guy upstairs couldn't be bothered to touch these up a little?"

Castiel doesn't bother to correct Raz, tell him it was a being much older than God that sent him back to Earth. Besides, the Empty was hardly more indifferent than his father. His Father, who walked and fought side by side with Lucifer but had not a word to say to Castiel, who healed his favorite son after Amara's torments but didn't spare a second glance at the one who was broken beyond repair.

Raz runs his gaze up and down Castiel's wings, staring at the charcoal feathers, bent and battered and in some places missing altogether, at the dead tissue and exposed bone where for months stolen grace had corroded Castiel's very essence. Manifested physically like this, the wings do not cause greater pain than Castiel is used to enduring from them, but the sensation is...rawer, more immediate, like everything his vessel experiences, and the lateral change is...unbalancing. It sets his teeth on edge, turns his breathing shallow and frantic despite his best efforts to remain calm.

"They tell all sorts of wild tales about angel wings," Raz muses. "A feather will grant you a wish, or burn your heart out, or make you a god. A demon who touches them will go insane, a demon who touches them will be blinded, a demon who touches them will be dead within the week."

Castiel shakes his head mutely, in denial. Raz ignores him. "End of the day, though, I don't give a fuck about the stories," he muses. "Getting to work a little magic on these gorgeous—well, I assume they _were_ , once—things is pretty much its own reward."

Castiel gathers himself and makes a last-ditch effort, twisting his face out of Raz's grip and _rolling_ , using his wings to propel himself away. The tail ends of his shirt, still tangled around his wrists, whip against his torso. Pain shoots through the fragile bones as they jostle against the stone floor, but he gets one knee under him and—

—then there's a sickening _crunch_ and a forked bolt of agony shoots through what feels like his entire body. He bites down a cry of shock and distress and whips his head around to see Raz's booted foot planted squarely on the end of his left wing.

"Don't run away from me, halo," says Raz. His eyes shift to onyx, shining like beetle carapaces. "Get back here before I start stamping."

Castiel tries to speak and coughs instead; he tastes blood and realizes that he's bitten down on his tongue. Raz doesn't lift his foot; pain continues to shoot up into Castiel's left shoulder. On his knees, bent awkwardly at the waist to keep from pulling on the pinned wing, he edges slowly back towards his tormentor.

"Better," Raz says softly, his eyes still black and empty. He moves in a single fluid step; Castiel lets out a choked sound as the pressure lifts off his wing, and then Raz is behind him, crouching, twisting a hand into Castiel's hair to pull his head back.

"Please," whispers Castiel. "Don't."

"Don't get me wrong, angel, I like hearing you beg, but you're not going to change my mind."

On his knees, Castiel pulls his wings close around him, as far from Raz as he can. It's not enough. "Please," he repeats, a ragged gasp.

"If it helps," says Raz off-handedly, "you can pretend I'm Dean." He drops his hand onto the curve of Castiel's left wing, gripping a fistful of burned nerve endings and torn feathers, and twists.

***

The fates take pity on Castiel; he passes out before long, the pain of his wings too much when combined with the horror of Raz's hand on them. Even with his grace fettered, his wings maintain a particularly strong connection to his true form; Raz's demonic touch is corruption, agony, an attack on his essence that he is powerless to fight. After interminable minutes of Raz wrenching and yanking on feathers and ligaments, a piercing pain near the base of his right wing burns out every coherent thought in his brain and he blacks out.

Unconsciousness is a mercy that doesn't last long. He comes to alone on the cold floor, facedown, throbbing pain running through both his manhandled wings. He tries to pull them in close to his body and has to stop with a muffled sob as the nerve endings begin shrieking in protest.

The cuffs that lock his grace are also keeping him from pulling his wings back into the etheric plane, Castiel realizes as he attempts this without success. He rolls painfully onto his left side and turns his head to survey the right wing as it drops across his hip and over the stones, leaving sticky streaks of crimson wherever it touches. The feathers are even more mangled than before, and one of the bones juts out at an odd angle that both suggests and feels like some sort of fracture. A memory surfaces: Raz gripping the wing in both hands and _wrenching_ it, the dark cruelty of his essence raking over Castiel's like razor wire.

He twists his neck farther to survey more of the damage, and his eyes slide over a set of tiny puncture wounds in the muscle near where the wing joins his shoulder. Raz had _bitten_ him. A stab of disgust and horror runs through him like ice water; his stomach turns and he retches emptily, fists clenched behind his back.

Out of options, Castiel does the only thing he can; he clears his mind, shuts it down as best as he can and drifts in a hazy semiconscious state, riding slow waves of pain through the slowly dragging hours. It's a poor respite, and it doesn't last long. Another illusion of Dean arrives, slipping into the cell and sinking to its knees in front of him, hands held out but at a distance, as if afraid to touch Castiel, to reveal itself for what it is.

Castiel had opened his eyes at the sound of footsteps entering his cell. Now he studies the torch-lit image of Dean wavering in front of him. He cracks a smile that tugs his split lip back open. This again.

" _Fuck_ , Cas, thank god you're o—" the hallucination glances at the wreckage of Castiel's vessel and has the decency to look chagrined, "—well, actually you look like crap, but— _fuck_ , I'm glad you're alive, we've been trying to find you for weeks—"

"Fuck off, Raz." Castiel rasps. He's too tired, and seeing Dean this close—the lines of his face, the green of his eyes—it's too hard.

"Cas? What the hell?"

"Stop playing with me," Castiel spits, with venom he thinks the real Dean would have been proud of. "I know this game—if you're going to torture me—just _do_ it, stop wasting our time."

The hallucination of Dean simply stares at him, expression unreadable in the dim light. Castiel cranes his neck, but he can't see Raz anywhere—not in the cell, not in the corridor, not in the cell's open doorway. He supposes the demon could be standing in the shadows at the back of the cell, where Castiel can't see without moving and jostling his wings. Standing with a smirk and a knife, waiting to reveal himself. Eyes fixated on Castiel's limp wings.

"I'm—" Castiel's voice breaks halfway through the sentence. His wings shake involuntarily. "I'm _tired_." _Not my wings_ , he thinks, _not again, I can't, I can't_ —

"Cas, calm down—"

"Just—just kill me. I'm done. I can't—let me take my wings back, and you can kill me, I don't care—"

The fake Dean is saying something in response, its voice rising agitatedly to match Castiel's, but Castiel ignores it, speaking loudly to Raz, wherever he's hiding. Fear twists viciously in his gut; what if Raz isn't tempted by the offer, what if he keeps Castiel with his wings out, as helpless as if they were pinned to a card—

"You can do anything, I'll take the polyp again, I'll—" He can hear himself babbling, hear the words tumbling desperately from his lips. His breath hitches; he fights down the urge to retch again. "Just don't touch my wings, _please_ —"

"Cas, _please_ , listen—" Dean is holding Castiel's face urgently between his two hands, leaning in, raising his voice over Castiel's frantic pleading. "It's okay, it's _okay_ , Cas, I'm not gonna friggin' touch your—your wings—it's okay, I got you, it's okay—"

Castiel stutters to a halt, mid sentence.

Dean.

Dean is.

Dean is _holding_ his face.

Castiel can feel Dean's palms—broad, warm, a little rough, cupped against the sides of his jaw. He can feel the pads of Dean's thumbs resting against his cheekbones. He can feel Dean's breath ghosting over his lips.

"Dean?" he whispers. Fights down the wild hope that unfurls suddenly inside him.

"Yeah," says Dean. "Yeah, hey, Cas. Hey."

Castiel shudders, disbelief and uncertainty filling him in equal measure. "You—you're—"

It's a trick, he tells himself. Just a trick. Just a more elaborate illusion, and Raz is going to step out at any moment, black-eyed and laughing. But Dean's hands are warm and steady and _solid_ , and Dean's gaze is searching and careful, and Castiel trembles and strains forward without quite realizing what he's doing.

"But you...how...?"

"Long story," says Dean. He moves his hand down to Cas's shoulder, squeezing it carefully, a gentle pressure. "Right now we gotta move. Okay, Cas?"

"Okay," Castiel breathes.

It's not a trick. It's Dean. Dean is _here_.

"Alright, can you—can you walk? Are your wings—" Dean gestures helplessly.

The realization goes through Castiel in horrified jolt—his _wings_ , Dean is _seeing_ his wings, mangled and bloody and disgusting as they are, and Castiel is helpless to hide them. He tries anyway, tries to fold them in close to his body, only for the fractured bones and strained muscles to clamor in revolt and refuse to do his bidding. The remnants of his wings twitch and drag pathetically over the stones as Castiel struggles into a sitting position, breathing hard, avoiding Dean's eyes, shame making his face grow hot.

"Whoa, easy, there, tiger, you're—" Dean swallows, his eyes flickering over Cas's bare skin, the half-healed wounds and burn marks— "you're gonna hurt yourself more—"

"Take the cuffs off," Castiel demands. If his grace is freed, he can pull the wings back into the etheric plane, release the physical manifestation of them. It'll make them hurt a great deal less, and—and more importantly, Dean won't be able to see them any longer. "Get them _off_ , please—Dean—"

"Okay, just—hold on—" Dean shifts, trying to move behind Castiel, clambering awkwardly around the bent expanse of Castiel's left wing.

" _Please_ , Dean—"

" _Okay_ —"

Castiel shifts desperately, twisting to present his bound hands to Dean; the movement jostles his wings again and he hisses, muscles jumping in protest. His left wing twitches and scrapes over the rough stone floor and he tries to lift it, pain making him careless. It brushes over Dean's arm, dragging clumsily over Dean's wrist and the back of his hand, and Castiel freezes, sucking in a sharp breath, a gasp that's mirrored behind him as Dean goes absolutely still.

It goes through Castiel like an electric shock, like music ringing in his bones—Dean, Dean's _soul_ , it's Dean's _soul_ he's feeling, the touch of it is unmistakable despite how many years it's been since Castiel laid a hand on it, in all its light and warmth and protectiveness and love—broken though they are, his wings are a conduit to his true form, and—

—and Castiel's wings are shattered beyond repair, twisted mockeries of what they once were, and his true form is barely any better, and how _dare_ he touch Dean with that ruin, what Dean must think of him—

He yanks the wing back, away from Dean, ignoring the pain, ignoring Dean's sudden exhale. He grits his teeth against the cry of loss that goes up somewhere inside him when the electric music of the contact vanishes.

"The fuck was that?" says Dean slowly, his hands working at the cuffs.

Castiel presumes he was referring to the wing, which he supposes is probably near-unrecognizable by now, or to Castiel's mishap with it.

"I'm sorry," he says haltingly. "It was an accident—I didn't mean to get them on you—"

The horrifying thought comes that perhaps he's gotten blood on Dean's arm, now, or the grime from the cell floor, or the lingering filth of Raz's touch which he can feel clinging to the feathers, and he turns his head, trying to see Dean's hand, just as Dean says, "No, I meant what was—" and the cuffs open with a soft _click_.

Castiel's grace pulls free with a howl, flooding through his cells. It's weakened from being pinioned for so long, and he can feel it struggling to heal his many wounds, but it's enough for him to dematerialize his wings, and he does so with a half-sob, yanking them out of the realm of visibility with a shudder of relief.

"Cas? Cas, you okay? Answer me, man."

Castiel keeps his gaze trained on the floor, but he nods shakily. Dean has Castiel's hands in both of his own, massaging them carefully as circulation returns, his fingers tracing gently over the raw skin beneath where the cuffs had rested.

"We have to go," Castiel mutters. "We have to..."

"Yeah, that's what I've been saying, dude."

"Raz...Raz will..."

"Who the fuck's Raz? He did this to you?"

"He'll come back," Castiel says, frantic fear blooming suddenly within him. He's suddenly certain that Raz will know the cuffs have been removed, that Raz is on his way to the cell _right now_ , that he'll find Dean, and Castiel is useless right now, dead weight in a fight—

Dean has an arm around him, a hand braced against Castiel's bare chest. Dean is speaking soothingly in his ear. "Cas, relax, Sam's keeping a lookout, we just gotta get your clothes back on and hustle out of here, c'mon."

Castiel shakes his head in panic. "I can't leave," he whispers, panicked. Raz has touched his wings. Raz will find him. Castiel will lead him right to the Winchesters. "You have to leave me, you can't take me with you, Raz will, he'll find me, he'll—"

A body crashes onto the floor of the cell, head bouncing against the stones with a sickening crunch, face still contorted into a grimace. Castiel jerks away in shock. It's Raz; his eyes are open and sightless, his short hair matted to the side of his face. The wound in his chest is still emitting a few half-hearted red-gold sparks.

"Who's Raz?" says Sam from the doorway, wiping blood off the demon-killing knife. "Was he that asshole?"

Castiel can't speak. He stares at the body of his tormentor, its lifeless gaze. Tries to process what he's seeing.

"Great timing, Sam," says Dean in disgust, staring at the body. He's holding Castiel's left hand now, his thumb running gentle circles against the skin of it, almost unconsciously. "Why the hell'd you drag it over here for?"

"Yeah, he was saying some shit about Cas," says Sam, his voice taut with carefully controlled anger. Castiel flinches. "Didn't care for his tone."

"I—" Castiel chokes. "I—he—" Out of the corner of his eye, he can see comprehension dawning on Dean's face, and the elder Winchester tightens his arm around him. Castiel forces himself to raise his head and look Sam in the eye, afraid of what he might find there. He can guess at some of the things Raz might have said to Sam, and none of them are good. But Sam meets his gaze evenly, his expression neutral except for a faint crease of worry on his brow, and he directs his next words to Castiel, "Thought you'd like to see his corpse."

Castiel manages to nod.

"Yeah, well," says Dean, looking at Raz's body with the same expression a person might give a crushed cockroach, "fuck that dude. Cas, come on, let's get out of here."

Castiel tears his eyes away from the thing that had tortured and taunted him for weeks, and manages to take Dean's hand. _They found me_ , he thinks dizzily, as Sam steps over Raz's corpse and reaches for Castiel's other arm. Raz is gone. The Winchesters came for him.

The Winchesters aren't angels, and they aren't demons. They can't snap their fingers and heal him, or undo all the damage, physical or otherwise, that he sustained during his captivity. But they did find him. They did come for him. And they do lift him carefully to his feet, and dress him when his hands shake too much to do it himself, and skim their fingers over the worst of his visible injuries in gentle, worried appraisal, and hold him steady when he stumbles, and lead him out of Hell, and take him home.

**Author's Note:**

> If by the end of this you felt like the whole thing was just an excuse for copious amounts of Castiel whump...uh...guilty as charged.


End file.
